“There is no force in the world but love, and when you
carry it within you, if you simply have it, even if you remain
baffled as to how to use it, it will work its radiant effects
and help you out of and beyond yourself: one must never lose
this belief, one must simply (and if it were nothing else) endure
in it!”[2]

“The divine Word speaks in the depth of every being, and
it speaks within our own selves. To find it we do not have to
travel far, we do not have to go out of ourselves. And we do
not have to travel far to find happiness; it suffices to descend
into the depth of our own being to discover our true identity
(that is, God). However, modern man always tries to flee from
himself. He can never be silent or alone, because that would
mean to be alone with himself, and this is why the places of
amusement and the cinemas are always filled with people. And
when they find themselves alone and are at a point where they
might encounter God, they turn on the radio or the television
set.”[3]

“The voice of the Beloved is existential rather than vocal.
It causes no echo in the ears nor in the mind but resounds in
much greater depth, in that ground where God dwells, that is,
in the innermost depths of man. . . .Thus God’s call is
a constant challenge, a call into the unknown, into adventure,
into following Him into the darkness and into solitude.”[4]

“The Christian is, I believe, one who sacrifices the half
truth for the sake of the whole truth, who abandons an incomplete
and imperfect concept of life for a life that is integral, unified,
and [whole]. Yet his entrance into such a life is not the end
of the journey, but only the beginning. A long journey must follow:
an anguished and sometimes perilous exploration. Of all Christians
the monk is, or at least should be, the most professional of
such explorers. His journey takes him through deserts and paradises
for which no maps exist. He lives in strange areas of solitude,
of emptiness, of joy, of perplexity and of admiration.”[5]

Why do Catholic
monks practice celibacy? This is an important question that
all too often monks have not
been very good at
answering. Why? In part, it is because the vast majority of us
are not only reluctant to talk about matters of sexuality in
general but of our experience of living celibacy in particular.
Consequently, when asked to explain our choice, if we answer
at all, we tend to fall back on a familiar set of responses that,
though true as far as they go, do not really say that much: “For
the sake of the kingdom,” we say, or “in order to
love everyone and not just one person, “ or “to be
more available to others.”[6] Then, once we have given
one or all of these reasons, we have been known to clear our
throats nervously, look at our feet, and take a deep breath and
hope that no one asks us any further questions. Because of our
reticence, it is little wonder that over the years some have
come to think of celibacy as an unnatural aberration that is
responsible for everything from the scarcity of vocations to
the monastic life and priesthood to the sexual abuse scandals
that have rocked the Church.

Be that as
it may, I think our reluctance to talk about matters of sexuality
and our experience of living
celibacy is only part
of the reason we find it so difficult to explain why Catholic
monks practice celibacy. The other part of the equation is spiritual
and has to do with monastic spirituality, with what it means
to be a monk—not a priest or professor, but a monk. Thus,
it has everything to do with how we identify ourselves, with
whether we identify ourselves primarily with what we do or with
what we are. Hence, I would contend that in far too many instances
we male monastics find it difficult to answer questions about
the practice of celibacy because we have failed to confront what
it means to be a monk.

In order to
answer the question of why Catholic monks practice celibacy,
it seems to me important to define
the terms that I
am using in posing the question itself. By taking this approach
I hope to formulate an answer to our question that goes beyond
pious platitudes and actually shed some light on “the heart
of the matter,” to borrow a phrase from Thomas Keating,[7]
who, in turn, borrowed it from Graham Greene. And so, first of
all, what do we mean by monasticism? What does it mean, from
a Catholic Christian perspective, to live the monastic life?
What does it mean to be a monk?

The Witness of Solitude and Freedom

The first thing
to note about Catholic Christian monasticism is that its significance
does not derive, nor has
it ever derived
(as some have mistakenly believed in both theory and practice),
from its being “an ecclesiastical job corps or. . . .an
exotic spiritual subculture or. . . .a comfortable lifestyle
enclave for the religious elite.”[8] On the contrary, it
has always and everywhere been the case that the monastic life
has been significant “because of what it is and not just
because of what some monks, in fact, do (however valuable that
may be) because monastic life is not merely a collection of individuals
who engage in a variety of good works but a distinctive state
of life in the Church.”[9]

The expression “state of life” means “a permanent,
stable, and public form of consecrated life in the Church. .
. .which raises to visibility in a special way some aspect or
dimension of the Christian mystery which all. . . .are called
to live but to which all do not witness in the same way.”[10]
This being so, we do well to ask: “To what aspect or dimension
of the Christian mystery does the monastic life witness in a
special way?”[11]

Simply stated,
the aspect or dimension of the Christian mystery to which the
monastic life bears witness
in a special way is
the radical, existential solitude of every human person. And
this solitude, which is the heart of our emptiness and the center
of our fullness, of our true self—a Self that, according
to the Christian mystical tradition, is understood to be one
with Christ in a nondualistic way[12]—this solitude is
the place where we encounter ever more profoundly “the
God Who is our Origin, our loving and benevolent Father and Mother,
our Savior, [our Dangerous Friend,][13] our unconditional Lover.”[14]
Indeed, this interior solitude “is the place where our
own hearts uncover our deep yearning to be loved unconditionally,
and to love with our whole being.”[15] It is “the
place of the great encounter, from which all other encounters
derive their meaning.”[16] For it is in this solitude that,
paradoxically, we discover that we are not alone; that there
is “a presence within our presence,”[17] one that
is “within us and around us. . . .and beyond us, and beyond
what is around us.”[18] A presence that is “infinite,
and infinitely loving, merciful, and beautiful. It is God as
the Beloved who blesses us and calls us the Beloved.”[19]

Hence, in our
existential solitude, we come to discover that there is something
about us that is “brighter than the
sun and more mysterious than the night sky.”[20] Here “we
leave behind our many activities, concerns, plans, and projects,
opinions, and convictions (as well as those of others) to enter
into the presence of Love, naked, vulnerable, open, and receptive.”[21]
Here we fall completely into our “mysterious essence”[22]
and know a self-emptying Love that is beyond all being, a Love
that unites within its vast embrace eros and agape, masculine
and feminine,[23] subject and object—a hidden Love that
is “the sourceless source, the ground of all creativity.”[24]
Here, in the solitude of our heart, we are led to a personal
and intimate relationship with the radical solitude of God, with
the emptiness or great fullness of Love—with “the
inconceivable profundity of ultimate reality”[25] that
is the ground of our freedom and the source of our true identity,
both as human beings and as monks.

Solitude is
the dimension of the Christian mystery to which the monastic
life bears witness in a special way.
Hence, we can
say that our “monastic life demands first of all a profound
understanding and acceptance of solitude.”[26] The essence
or spirit of this particular state of life, even in its cenobitic
or communal form, “is the spirit of solitude and of the
desert, the spirit of the life lived like that of St. John the
Baptist, Elijah, and St. Anthony,”[27] men of disciplined
wildness who dedicated their whole lives to wrestling with their
solitude,[28] men whose life-work was “to remain in the ‘cell’ of
their aloneness, whether it be a real cell in the desert, or
simply the spiritual cell of their own incomprehensible emptiness,”[29]and,
I would add, their fulness, men who knew in their bones that,
as Abba Moses once said, their “cell will teach them everything.”[30]

Thus, to the
extent that the Christian monastic life embraces and actually
embodies this spirit of the desert,
it proclaims
the truth that “this capacity for solitude is nothing else
than the full affirmation of one’s identity, that is to
say, the complete acceptance of oneself as willed by God and
of one’s being as given by God. It is also the complete
and loving acceptance of the ability to choose and to love, the
capacity and the necessity for choice which one must make in
the presence of God, under the eye of God, in the light of His
truth and of His redemptive love.”[31] Or, to put it a
slightly different way, to the extent that such a state of life
is true to its deepest meaning and inspiration, it bears vigorous
witness to the fact that each and every one of us has to take
responsibility for our own spiritual life, being willing to face
the full mystery of our lives by taking upon ourselves “the
lonely, barely comprehensible, incommunicable task of working
our way through the darkness of our own mystery until we discover
that our mystery and the mystery God merge into one reality,
which is the only reality. We dedicate ourselves to a life of
solitude because we believe that God lives in us and we in God—not
precisely in the way that words seem to suggest (for words have
no power to comprehend the reality)”[32] but in a way that
makes words lose their shape, as it were, and become “not
thoughts, not things, but the unspeakable beating of a Heart
within the heart of our own life.”[33]

Consequently,
it “should be quite clear that the failure
to accept and understand the basically solitary character of
the monastic life [constitutes]. . . .a failure of the monk to
fully achieve his identity and authenticity in that life.”[34]

Moreover, it
also should be quite clear that the Christian monk is (at least
ideally) someone who has responded
to an authentic
call of God to live a “desert life” of solitude and
freedom that is “outside normal social structures,”[35]
a life of unbounded wholeness or purity of heart, in which a “magnificent
spacious passion”[36] is to be found, a passionate nonattachment
or radical openness that is “an embracing surrender” to
the alluring and “inscrutable mystery that glows deep in
all human love, hope, and possibility,”[37] a mystery that,
while embracing “every hinted sense of being alone”[38]
in our particularity, is also our true, universal identity – our
true, timeless, and utterly vulnerable Self—that is always
and already one with Christ, who “prays. . . .in us, suffers
in us, dies in us. . . .sees through our eyes, listens through
our ears, loves through our hearts.”[39]

The monk is
one whose life is entirely committed to discovering and embodying
ever more fully the true unity
of the solitary
life “in which there is no possible division,” in
which he loses or forgets himself so as to become all, so as
to identify “himself with that ground in which all being.
. . .knows itself.”[40] And what is this ground? Simply
stated, it is Love. Thus “The paradox of solitude [and,
hence, of the monastic life] is that its true ground is universal
love—and true solitude [true monasticism] is the undivided
unity of love” for which there is no justification or determination
or explanation.[41]

Because of
this we can say that in its essence the life of the Christian
monk is “dedicated completely to love,” the
love of God, humanity, and all creation, “but a love that
is not determined by the requirements of a special task.”[42]
For the Christian monk is, or should be, someone “who is
mature enough and decided enough to live without the support
and consolation of family, job, ambition, social position or
even active mission in the apostolate.”[43] That is to
say, the monk is, or should be, mature enough and decided enough
and free enough to live beyond all definition, beyond all conventional
notions of productivity or usefulness; for in truth the monk’s
task or mission is not to do anything. Rather, it is to simply
be ever more consciously what each and every one of us is called
to be, and what in reality each of us always and already is:
a selfless Self, without fixed reference point, “silent
and alone everywhere. . . .not ‘divided,’ but one
with all in God’s Love. . . .in the infinite silences of
the Spirit, out of whose abysses love wells up without fail and
gives itself to all. . . .in which the meaning of every sound
is finally clear and the truth of words is to be distinguished,
not in their separateness, but in their pointing to the eternal
unity of Love” and to the truth that all words “say
one thing only: that all is Love.”[44] Those who are truly
alone, and who are conscious of what their solitude really means,
find themselves simply being in the hidden ground or mystery
of life, “in love with all, with everyone, with everything,” accepting “the
wholeness and completeness of everything in God’s Love,”[45]
in that brilliant emptiness, that luminous darkness, which is
our very fulfillment and plenitude, in which, as St. John of
the Cross said, “the All and the Nothing encounter one
another and are the Same.”[46]

Furthermore,
we can say that Christian monasticism, like all authentic forms
of monasticism, “aims at the cultivation
of a certain quality of life, a level of awareness, a depth of
consciousness, an area of transcendence and of adoration,”[47]
of openness and freedom which are not usually possible in other
forms of existence that often are more characterized or defined
by “the senseless tyranny of quantity.”[48] Hence,
in summary, we could say that it is and always has been “the
peculiar office of the monk” (be he Christian or otherwise)
to completely dedicate himself in a radical way to such a life
of inner transformation in love, to the “deepening of consciousness
toward an eventual breakthrough and discovery of a transcendent
dimension of life beyond that of the ordinary empirical self,”[49]
a dimension that simultaneously transcends and yet includes that
same ordinary self.

Celibacy and the Monastic Life

Now, it is
important to keep all of this in mind because it will help
us to better understand how the monastic
life and the
practice of celibacy are intimately related or even, in a certain
sense at least, mutually constitutive. And this in turn will
make it possible to answer the question “Why do Catholic
monks practice celibacy?” in a way that speaks to the experiential
heart of the matter. That is to say, it will allow us to further
demonstrate how celibacy, if it is to have any real meaning for
us as monks, has to be understood as being most truly rooted
in and, hence, an expression of our solitude, our love, our awareness
of what it means to be wholly human and thus fully alive.

So, when we
turn our attention to the practice of celibacy, one of the
first things we can note about it is
that in the monastic
context it is in fact an actual practice, a tool, a skillful
means, if you will, by which Catholic monks seek to “put
on the mind of Christ” (see Philippians 2:5). In other
words, it is a tool of the spiritual craft – like obedience
or stability or intentional simplicity of life—and a form
of renunciation by which we let go of “anything in our
experience that is a barrier between ourselves and others,”[50]
by which we become more available and open as we seek to enter
the very heart of Jesus, the center of his being, which means
also “entering into our own heart, the center of our being,
the core of our existence.”[51] Celibacy is a vital means
by which “our heart is burrowed out and. . . .the depth
of our being is laid bare: that [solitary] core of ourself”[52]
that mysteriously embraces both the darkest depths of being alone
and the brightest heights of being all one in love, that is to
say, in Christ.

But like other
traditional monastic practices, celibacy helps us to do this
in a very specific way. How? Generally
speaking,
it helps to re-examine the basic elements of our sexuality—“lovemaking,
gender, passion, the body, relationship, and procreation”[53]—from
a deeper and broader perspective that is rooted in the paradox
of solitude, a perspective, in other words, that fully recognizes
and appreciates the fact that we all have an unbearable longing
to unite with the Heart of Being, the naked Reality, “the
empty, immaculate, brilliant space of our own true nature”[54]—which
we know, in some intuitive way, is not only our true home and
who we most fundamentally are,”[55] but that to fully realize
this and embody it we must renounce everything, be stripped of
everything that separates or puts a barrier between us and God
and our fellow beings. Anything that serves as “a substitute
structure or representation of the Real has to go,”[56]
has to be surrendered. For “only when we are [thus] empty
of everything that is not God—only when we are thus beyond
identifying with every definition, with every fixed reference
point—can we receive the whole of what life has to give
and be fully attentive to what actually is. That is to say, only
then can we become utterly free and realize our [abiding] union
with the Living One who simply IS”[57] within and around
and beyond everything that arises in our experience moment by
moment. Only then can we pass from depth to depth in the solitude
of our own heart and reach the ultimate depth of the heart of
Christ Jesus, where, having passed beyond all, and freed from
all bonds, we finally come to the Source in whose eternal awakening
we discover that we are always and already fully and nondualistically
one[58] with the radiant, all-pervading I AMness of God. We realize,
in other words, that the All and the Nothing, the Lover and the
Beloved, the freedom of Emptiness and the fullness of Form are
united in the great embrace of One Taste. We see that even here
and now, in the deepest part of our very own heart, we are the
natural radiance and the unbounded openness of Love.

From this perspective,
then, we can understand that the practice of celibacy is a
practical means by which
the monk bears witness
to the paradoxical depth of his being. That is to say, celibacy
establishes the monk in solitude and makes possible a more visible
witness to the fact that solitude or “aloneness is…the
inner structure of the [monastic life just] as faithful and fruitful
mutuality is the inner structure of matrimony.”[59] As
such, the practice of celibacy itself proclaims—first to
the monk himself and then to everyone with whom he comes into
contact—the truth that there is at the heart of all human
being an existential solitude, an inescapable aloneness “which
no bonds, however deep, of friendship, community, or solidarity.
. . .can mitigate.”[60] This solitude is also at the same
time a radical emptiness or openness, a sacred space, a “holy
vacancy”[61] that belongs to, is reserved for—or,
better yet, is a reflection of—the One who dwells within
us, who is that Love which is “the beginning, the source,
and the goal” of all human life and activity.[62]

Thus, “by not marrying and by abstaining from the most
intimate expression of human love, the celibate [monk] becomes
a living sign of the limits of interpersonal relationships and
of the centrality of this inner sanctum that no human being may
violate,”[63] that nothing can destroy. Indeed, it is in
large part by means of his practice of celibacy (which in a very
real sense can be regarded as “a sort of ongoing street
theater”)[64] that the monk is constantly raising in his
own mind and in the minds of others questions about the deeper
meaning of human existence. The monk’s life, therefore,
is a sign of contradiction and of foolishness to many, even at
times to himself most especially. Yet the monk, like the clown,
chooses this particular form of foolishness because he knows
on some deep intuitive level that it contains a rich store of
wisdom. What is more, he knows in a similarly profound fashion
that the path he has chosen to tread is a dangerous one that
is possessed of its own alluring passion. Indeed, he knows it
is a consuming path of utter humility that, it must be repeatedly
acknowledged, he is “both. . . .incapable of [treading]
and even more incapable of abandoning the attempt to do so.”[65]

A Path of Foolishness and Hope

And so the
monk, the solitary celibate, chooses to walk a path of foolishness.
But he does so in the certain
hope and with the
naked trust that what he has come to know as the God of Love,
the Living One who simply IS, is and always will be enough.[66]
The foolishness that the monk chooses, therefore, is in reality
a blessed foolishness, a “holy madness,”[67] if you
will, that itself bears witness to the profound truth of his
life as a whole. And what truth is that? Simply this: that the
monastic life is a journey through, with, and in ordinary human
solitude “into that reality which is the ground of our
being and, if we are authentic enough in the journeying, the
blossom of our becoming.”[68] It is a life of “existential
risk”[69] that—if we are honest enough and courageous
enough to be true to its solitary nature, to its inner structure
of aloneness—takes us into the center of ourselves and
beyond ourselves “into the center of reality. . . .into
the very heart of life,”[70] the heart and true center
of which is love. As such, the monastic life is a search for “what
is most real and most true in our existence,”[71] and the
practice of celibacy is an important means by which this search
is carried out.

Yet, as a parenthetical
aside, and by way of bringing this reflection to a close, it
is important to note
that (from a Catholic monastic
perspective at least) the practice of celibacy also constantly
serves to remind us, and everyone whom we encounter, that our
way of life is not so much “the heroic quest of the spiritual
athlete”[72] as it is “a wrestling in the dark of
ordinary human beings who, for some reason known only to God,
have been attacked by a messenger who holds the secret of their
name and will not release it without wounding them,”[73]
that is, without plunging them into the heart of their existential
solitude, their inescapable aloneness, and piercing them with
the life-giving knowledge of the fact that this aloneness, “if
cherished, attended to, and dwelt in as the heart of one’s
vocation, finds its positive meaning”[74] in “the
contemplative intuition of loving wisdom,”[75] which, at
this level of the heart, or the “profoundest depths of
the self,”[76] signifies an abiding state of contemplative
prayer, of inner union with God, with the pervasive presence
of unconditioned and unconditional love. In this union all apparent
contradictions and all fragmentary attachments are “dissolved
in an indescribable simplicity, that is, an exceedingly intricate
complexity that flashes into a oneness”[77] that is, in
truth, “another marriage,”[78] but a timeless one
that continually invites us to realize ever more fully that this
is the ultimate reason why we as monks practice celibacy. Indeed,
the heart of the matter is to be found in the reassuring promise
and the constant challenge of this one contemplative truth that
bears repeating: “If we dare to penetrate our own silence
and dare to advance without fear into the solitude of our own
heart, and risk the sharing of that solitude with the lonely
other who seeks God through us and with us, then we will truly
recover the light and the capacity to understand what is beyond
words and beyond explanations because it is too close to be explained:
it is the intimate union in the depths of our own heart, of God’s
spirit and our own secret inmost self, so that we and God are
in all truth One Spirit.”[79]